Social networks presently exist as a means to connect individuals using a website. The following definition exists in the PCMAG.COM™ encyclopedia for “social network”:                An association of people drawn together by family, work or hobby. The term was first coined by Professor J. A. Barnes in the 1950s, who defined the size of a social network as a group of about 100 to 150 people.        
The following definition exists in the PCMAG.COM™ encyclopedia for “social network site”:                A Web site that provides a virtual community for people interested in a particular subject or just to “hang out” together. Members communicate by voice, chat, instant message, videoconference and blogs, and the service typically provides a way for members to contact friends of other members. Such sites may also serve as a vehicle for meeting in person. The “social networking site” is the 21st century term for “virtual community,” a group of people who use the Internet to communicate with each other about anything and everything.        Friendster (www.friendster.com) was the first social networking site, which was introduced in 2002 and followed by MySpace (www.myspace.com) a year later. Started by two friends, MySpace became extremely popular, and its parent company, Intermix, was acquired by News Corporation for $580 million two years after MySpace was launched.        Facebook (www.facebook.com) came out in 2004 initially targeting college students, but later welcoming everyone. Following Facebook were TagWorld (www.tagworld.com) and Tagged (www.tagged.com). TagWorld introduced tools for creating more personalized Web pages, and Tagged introduced the concept of building tag teams for teens with like interests.        Social networking sites compete for attention much like the first Web portals when the Internet exploded onto the scene in the mid-1990s. Many variations are expected.        
Many social network sites allow users to upload and share photos. Some also incorporate a feature for tagging photos to identify the names of people (faces) in the photos (FACEBOOK™, for example, provides this feature). Based on user surveys the majority of respondents state that the tagging effort is manual and very time consuming. Also, for privacy reasons, many users do not upload all of their digital photos to the sharing website. It is also very time consuming and bandwidth intensive to upload thousands of photos. So while a user of a social network site may have 10,000 digital photos on their local computer, they only upload one or two hundred to share with their friends. This is based on user surveys conducted by Applied Recognition Inc. in September 2007.
There are also websites that allow registered users to upload digital photos and digital video and store them on a website for sharing purposes. These are dedicated to this purpose. Examples of these sites include FLICKR™ and PHOTOBUCKET™. The drawback with these sites is that all tagging of photos to identify friends is manual and time consuming; PHOTOBUCKET™ does not allow people tagging in a photo. With FLICKR™, if an average photo contains two people, then it may take 10-15 seconds per photo to tag the people. When that time is multiplied by 100 or 1000, it becomes too time-consuming and the average person just will not perform tagging.
Rapid growth in photo-taking devices is occurring today with the incorporation of digital cameras in most modern cell phones. In fact, more cameras are sold via cell phones today than all dedicated digital cameras combined. This is causing a proliferation in the number of digital images that are uploaded and stored on home computers. Because the average number of digital images exceeds 1000 based on our surveys, the effort is too great to manually tag and properly organize the images for the majority of people.
One company, RIYA™ (www.riya.com), created a product that is web-based for identifying faces in digital photos. This product involved the download of a software module for identifying faces in photos on the user's local computer before uploading these photos to the remote RIYA™ web-based server where the faces were compared with other faces to find matches. This product is a prototype and as such has no automatic photo sharing features based on recognition. It also has no features for enabling the user to correct the inevitable errors that occur in any automated face detection and recognition method.